California state government continues to face a massive deficit that is in the tens of billions of dollars. A deficit that I would submit is largely a function of decades of liberal Democrat driven public policies in Sacramento that are highlighted by a virtually unchallenged and unoriginal toxic agenda – increase spending consistently, increase taxes consistently, and increase regulations consistently. This is not rocket science, when you do all three of these things consistently, you eventually hit a breaking point. You break taxpayers, and you break the economy itself.
It’s been interesting and distressing watching the political-class in and around the State Capitol go through all sorts of gyrations to try and avoid the obvious solution to our state’s fiscal woes. We’ve seen accusations that term limits are the problem. They aren’t. We’ve heard that the taxpayer protections in Proposition 13 are the problem. They aren’t. Now are told that Republican participant in the state budget because of the 2/3rds vote is the problem – and it isn’t.
Sadly, a review of GOP votes in state budget shows that, frankly, Republicans never hold out for a responsible budget. Invariably the budgets that are passed – stink. Rather famously in 2008, Senate Republicans held up the budget for weeks (I recall FR legislative bloggers updating our readers from the Senate floor, where they were in “lock down”) – and the result of that was hundreds of millions in savings, yet it was on a state budget of over $100 billion! And of course, look to just months later for a tragic example of how Republican votes being needed for a budget were not only unsuccessful at passing a good budget, we also saw a few GOPers cross party-lines to pass “bipartisan” massive tax increase, the largest in our state’s history.
The recipe for state government to get out of its downward spiral is to reverse course completely. Or more directly put, we need to decrease spending, consistently – we need to decrease taxes, consistently – and we need to decrease regulations, consistently. This kind of change doesn’t require reforms of the system (with the potential exception of fair redistricting reform), but rather it requires a political sea-change in Sacramento. Frankly, it’s time to put Republicans in charge of the legislature. The Democrats have proven time and time again that their failed progressive, liberal, big-government policies simply don’t work, and they certainly don’t pencil out.
Unfortunately, Sacramento Democrat are not alone in embracing exactly the wrong public policy agenda for the people – President Barack Obama, Senate Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are doing more of the same – and the combination of overspending, overtaxing and over-regulating at the federal and state levels of government is creating a “perfect political storm” in America, and especially here in California. We won’t know until November whether or not Republicans will make the kind of substantial gains needed to turn our nation, and our state in the right direction.
That said, in the meantime, look for the dying spasms of the liberal elites, epitomized by the avocation of majority vote budgets, to be the rallying cry of the left for the next eight months. These liberals can be assured that unless they are willing to acknowledge the failure of their ideology, the iceberg that is dead ahead will strike their Titanic.
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